702 



POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



in its race, is transmitted to its pup- 

 pies when these are secluded from all 

 chance of instruction or imitation. 

 The students who make natural se- 

 lection the be-all and the end-all of 

 evolution assume that it seizes upon 

 favoring variations, even the slight- 

 est, as they appear. Whether these 

 variations are indebted to parental 

 experience directly transmitted is a 



question which only careful experi- 

 ment can decide. The significance 

 of the work when interpreted, the 

 charm of coming upon results wholly 

 new, must do much to extend interest 

 in natural history. Often that in- 

 terest comes early to a weary end 

 in the dust of common-place and 

 meaningless adding of shell to shell 

 and butterfly to butterfly. 



9 jctrattfic 



SPECIAL BOOKS. 



IN these days when many wonders are being accomplished through 

 electricity, and greater ones are constantly expected, it is interesting to 

 glance backward into the times when the lodestone and the sulphur globe 

 stood for all that was known about this mysterious form of energy. Such 

 a glance is afforded us by Mr. Park Benjamin's * popular history of the 

 advance of knowledge in this subject. Our author has ranged far and wide 

 to gather his material. He has laid under contribution the works of those 

 early philosophers who took all knowledge for their province, the Greek 

 and Roman classics, the results of modern investigation into the old civ- 

 ilization of Phoenicia, Egypt, and even of people of prehistoric epochs, the 

 Norse histories, the ancient writings of the Chinese and Arabs, the treatises 

 of the fathers of the Church, the works of mediseval monks, magicians, 

 cosmographers, and navigators, etc. The significance of the title he has 

 chosen lies in the fact that he has aimed not so much to chronicle the 

 laying of fact upon fact in the building of the present science of electricity 

 as to show how the progress of the human intellect is indicated by the way 

 in which it has grappled with and overcome the problems in this field that 

 have successively presented themselves. He shows how mythology, which 

 was the world's resource for explaining strange phenomena when the lode- 

 stone became known, gave way to philosophy, and how philosophy in turn 

 yieJded its sway to science. Who first discovered that a freely suspended 

 magnet will point north and south our author does not undertake to say, 

 but from a careful examination of the allusions to the use of the compass 

 in Chinese writings, and a consideration of the Chinese character, he is 

 convinced that it was not the Chinese. For several centuries the develop- 

 ment of the compass was the only advance in the field of magnetism made 

 by Arabs or Northmen or the peoples of western Europe. Roger Bacon 

 made some interesting observations on the compass, but it appears that the 

 French engineer, Peter Perigrinus, of whom Bacon speaks in glowing 

 terms, made an experimental study of this instrument, which was far more 

 fruitful than any earlier efforts. Among other things he revealed the law 



* The Intellectnal Rise in Electricity. By Park Benjamin. Pp. 611, 8vo. New York : D. Apple- 

 ton & Co. Price, $4. 



